Janus Joyce: A Report on the 22-23 January 2014 presentations “Postal Joyce” by William S. Brockman at New York University and “James Joyce v. Samuel Roth” by Robert Spoo at Columbia University, New York

The newspapers said snow would be general all over New York. Janus, the blizzard of 2014, named for the double-headed Roman god of beginnings and transitions, blew into the Big Apple in late January, dumping nearly a foot of snow on a frigid metropolis just hours before the first of two evening talks on Joyce that were to be presented at two of the city’s premier educational institutions; we were “in for a night of it” (D 177). As a result, Robert Spoo’s talk “James Joyce v. Samuel Roth,” which opened an exhibit on Roth at Columbia University, was postponed for forty-eight hours and followed William Brockman’s lecture on “Postal Joyce” at New York University, rather than having preceded it as scheduled. Yet the snow, that was general, did little to frost Gotham’s Joyceans, who turned out in force nonetheless to hear Brockman and Spoo.

Brockman’s talk, hosted by New York’s James Joyce Society, took place at Glucksman Ireland House, home to NYU’s Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies. In spite of the continuing bad weather, Society President Nick Fargnoli welcomed over two dozen icicled attendees at the Center’s elegant Fifth Avenue townhouse, just north of the Washington Square Park Arch in the heart of Greenwich Village. When my wife and I arrived, a light fringe of snow was on the shoulders of our overcoats; we slipped them off and let the “cold fragrant air from out-of-doors” escape from their “crevices and folds” (D 177). After everyone was seated, the program began with introductory remarks by Fargnoli and a dramatic reading by Simon Loekle of Wyndham Lewis’s infamous written account of T. S. Eliot’s delivery of a pair of old brown shoes to Joyce in Paris in August 1920, sent courtesy of Ezra Pound (JJII 493).

Brockman’s insightful remarks had a dual focus: outlining the project to publish previously unpublished Joyce correspondence, beginning in 2016, and offering new tidbits of intriguing Joyce epistolary history revealed during the course of the research phase of his joint publishing endeavor with co-editors Kevin Dettmar and Spoo.

Brockman opened his talk by noting that the bookdealer Jacob Schwartz—who met Joyce in the late 1920s and (with Joyce’s assistance) began collecting Joyceana—had spoken about collecting Joyce materials at the 23 October 1951 meeting of the New York Joyce Society.¹ During that period, first editions of Joyce’s books, manuscripts, and correspondence could still be readily found and purchased for a relative pittance. In contrast, Brockman remarked that a single newly unearthed “dirty” Joyce letter was recently sold “to a collector of love letters in Switzerland” for in excess of $300,000.

By Brockman’s exacting count, 3,652 pieces of Joyce correspondence (letters, postcards, telegrams, and the like) are known, with only 1,737 previously compiled—or more than half (1,915) still unpublished—and that does not include items known to be “missing” or “destroyed.” As an example of the latter, Brockman illustrated via overhead projector an envelope at the British Library, hand-addressed by Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver and marked “Letter Destroyed—HSW,” apparently because the content of the letter involved “family affairs.” Another letter and envelope Brockman showed (this one written by Pound to Joyce) was marked “Opened by Censor.” It seems that during the German occupation of France in World War II, Pound sent this letter to Joyce, enclosing a review of one of Joyce’s books. In a side note to the letter, Pound addressed the censor directly, explaining that he was only trying to send the enclosed review to Joyce. Ironically, Joyce received the letter; the review had been removed.

Brockman and his colleagues spend a good portion of their research time traveling to the “hundreds of places” where they have discovered unpublished Joyce correspondence. He noted, for instance, that eighty-two of these unpublished items, written...